One of the biggest challenges for the workshop in Cape Town is to accommodate participation by people who can’t be there. After all, there is irony in the size of the carbon footprints for many of us to travel all the way to South Africa, and many of the organizing committee members felt it’s too far to travel. We’ve ruled out the idea of video-conferencing (our experience is that the technology and bandwidth at conference centres just isn’t reliable enough). However, after a little brainstorming, we came up with some interesting ideas:

Invite people to submit youtube-style videos, to be posted on the conference website. The best of these will be shown in a session at the workshop;

Make full use of twitter and friendfeed to connect with remote participants, perhaps projecting the feeds up on the screen during the workshop. (tags are ready – twitter: #wsrcc-2; friendfeed: wsrcc-2-may-2010);

Have one session at the workshop opened up to audio conferencing. The second afternoon session would work best for this, as will permit participation from most timezones: it’ll be evening in India, afternoon in Europe; and morning in N. & S. America. And I’m led to believe that the Aussies and Japanese are always happy stay up all night anyway…

And I was keen to experiment with embodied social proxies, but I don’t think we’ll be able to get the kit together for this year…

Anyway, I’d be interested in more ideas, and encourage everyone to participate, either physically or remotely. The draft program is up already.